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While David Airlie has been landing fixes in the RADV Vulkan driver for Radeon RX Vega GPUs, things aren't going quite as smoothly as planned with Airlie now disabling the Vega GPU support in this open-source driver.

Noticing I had an AMD Athlon II X3 425 system still racked up and hadn't been powered on in a long time, I decided to decomission it, but not before running some final benchmarks on that system. Having the recent AMD Ryzen 3 1200 / 1300X CPUs I decided it would make for an interesting comparison how the old Athlon II X3 compares to AMD's low-end CPU of today, the Ryzen 3 processors based on Zen. Here are those benchmarks that also include performance-per-Watt and overall AC system power consumption numbers.

NVIDIA is working on a new OpenGL memory usage reporting extension, NV_query_resource. Before anyone jumps though to bash NVIDIA over coming up with yet-another-memory-reporting extension for OpenGL, this one is aimed at reporting the usage at an object-level rather than just overall amounts.

It's fairly rare these days seeing improvements to the xf86-video-ati DDX: the driver for those running a pre-AMDGPU (GCN 1.2) graphics card with this driver paired with Radeon DRM and not using the generic xf86-video-modesetting driver instead. But if you are using xf86-video-ati and use the "TearFree" feature to try to avoid screen tearing, a number of patches landed today.

Jerome Glisse of Red Hat has published his 25th revision to the Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) patch series. HMM is about allowing a process address space to be mirrored and for system memory to be transparently used by any device process.

This week another new feature has landed in Phoronix Test Suite 7.4 Git for making it even easier for new (and existing) users of the Phoronix Test Suite to easily add additional perspective to their system's performance with OpenBenchmarking.org seamless comparisons.

With my Radeon RX Vega benchmarks so far this week I have been using the amd-staging-4.12 tree that contains the DC display code and Vega support. Though even with fresher code is amd-staging-drm-next, so here are some benchmarks.

It looks like AMD developers have an initiative underway to make the process easier of updating the Radeon Linux graphics drivers whether it be the fully open-source driver stack or the hybrid AMDGPU-PRO driver.

Today marks the third iteration of the rolling-release Solus Linux distribution project that has become increasingly popular with enthusiasts and is also aligned with their own Budgie Desktop Environment.

Eric Anholt at Broadcom continues working on the VC5 driver stack that should yield next-generation graphics for future Broadcom SoCs, some of which will hopefully make it into future Raspberry Pi revisions.

14 August

Of the many interesting findings from this morning's AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 / 64 Linux review was how the open-source AMDGPU+RadeonSI driver stack with OpenGL actually outperforms AMDGPU-PRO driver, the hybrid Radeon Linux driver relying upon AMD's closed-source OpenGL driver that's also shared with the Windows OpenGL driver. Here are more benchmarks of the RX Vega 56 and RX Vega 64 showing the margins by which AMDGPU+RadeonSI can outperform AMDGPU-PRO.

For those anxious to see AMDGPU's DC / DAL / display code mainlined either for the Radeon RX Vega support, FreeSync capabilities, HDMI/DP audio, or other display features, there is now a public TODO list.

The Radeon RX Vega is shipping today and for Linux gamers this is a serious AMD offering for being able to handle modern Linux games. But it goes beyond that in the RX Vega launch easily being the most successful launch ever for a GPU backed by open-source drivers on launch day. I've been spending the past several days testing the Radeon RX Vega 56 and RX Vega 64. The RX Vega 56 is a very competent graphics card for $399 USD while those wanting to reach peak performance for Linux gaming on a open-source system can find the RX Vega 64 for $499 USD. The open-source support for Vega isn't without some initial setup hurdles and some growing pains along the way, but it's looking very good for launch-day and the best DRM+Mesa support we have ever seen at-launch for the premiere of a new discrete GPU architecture.

With the just-posted Radeon RX Vega 56 / 64 Linux review, there aren't any OpenCL benchmarks due to some issues encountered in the process. When the Vega OpenCL support is in better shape, results will be published. But for those anxious to see anyways what the current ROCm OpenCL performance looks like for Ethereum with Ethminer, here's a quick look.

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